Carlota Perez


Carlota Perez is a British-Venezuelan scholar specialized on technology and socio-economic development. She researches the concept of Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts and the theory of great surges, a further development of Schumpeter's work on Kondratieff waves. In 2012 she was awarded the Silver Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation.

Career

Perez is currently Honorary Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London; Honorary Professor at SPRU, University of Sussex; and Adjunct Professor of Technology and Socio-Economic Development at Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia. She is also the Academic-in-Residence at Anthemis UK. From 2013-2016 she was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, where she remains a Visiting Professor. Prior to that she was affiliated to CERF and the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. She regularly gives visiting lectures at other universities around the world.
Her career began at the Central University of Venezuela where she studied the structural causes of the energy crisis in the mid-1970s and then in the civil service at the Institute of Foreign Trade in relation to the technology aspects of the North-South Dialogue. As founding Director of Technology in the Ministry of Industry, she established the first venture capital agency, FINTEC. She has been consultant to most of the major public and private companies in Venezuela, in particular to INTEVEP, the Research and Development affiliate of PDVSA, the national petroleum company.
As international consultant, she has worked for various multilateral organizations, including the OECD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNESCO, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the Andean Pact and the World Bank. She also acts as consultant for major corporations, industry associations, Ministries and Councils of Industry, Science and Technology, R&D institutes and development banks in most countries in Latin America and in other regions. Several elements of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy were based on her work, and in 2015 she was Chair of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Expert Group for Green Growth and Jobs.

Theory

Carlota Perez is a neo-Schumpeterian, and Christopher Freeman was her mentor, with whom she closely collaborated. Her articles, from the early 1980s, have contributed to the present understanding of the relationship between basic innovations, technical and institutional change, and economic development. Her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital has had a very positive response from academics as well as from the financial and the technology-based business communities. The book has contributed to a Schumpeterian understanding of the link between innovation and financial dynamics. In it Perez, speaking from 2002, lays out a history of five technological revolutions that follow a similar pattern of bang, bust and, hopefully, renewal.
In 2000 Perez co-founded The Other Canon, a center and network for heterodox economics research, with - amongst others - main founder and executive chairman Erik Reinert. Having collaborated with Mariana Mazzucato for the past decade, she was the founding Honorary Professor at Mazzucato's new Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL, where does research and lectures on the undergraduate and MPA .